On Charles Bremner’s excellent blog, there a good piece which unwittingly picks up the theme of my blog on Monday: how the mistrust (and possibly dislike) of the English starts at school. Charles’ blog is much more visceral – dealing with the experiences of French school children going to stay with English families – and it makes gruesome reading. I have to say it tallies absolutely with what the children I teach have told me – although they went to Ireland not England. The idea that families take in these children not out of interest or as one half of an exchange but almost professionally, to make money, shocks me. But not all the blame lies with the receiving parents: once the obligatory museum visit was over, the French teacher accompanying the kids from my area apparently left them every evening in down-town Dublin, telling them to make their own way to wherever their host family lived. He, considering himself off-duty (not paid to work more than 35 hours a week after all), then went to enjoy himself. Since “my” kids mostly live on isolated farms, the idea of finding their way from the centre of a capital city to the suburbs by public transport is….well, let’s be positive and say it’s a hands-on lesson in urban survival.

The kids’ interest in the whole affair was minimal from the start – their hard-working parents coughed up for them simply because all the other parents had and they felt honour-bound to keep up. By definition the ones I coach are on the low end of the learning curve (in fact more of a straight horizontal), and are incapable of fully understanding even a carefully phrased sentence in English, let alone replying. Their parents would never dream of taking them to a museum, let alone a foreign country, so their appreciation of those aspects was zero, even in French they didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it to me afterwards (the flight there was what they remembered most), so moaning about the food (and lack of it) and their hosts’ cold reception was all they could relate to. That was what tumbled out when their parents asked them “How was it?” The shock on their parents’ faces naturally encouraged them to expound further.

Already, four and a half weeks into the Sarkozy regime, the French are feeling better. After years of being told they are in decline, and passing on this gloom-laden message to opinion pollsters, they have now decided things go better with Sarko. A BVA poll has shown that the majority of those asked are optimistic about the future. Whereas in February 63% said they thought De Villepin’s policies were poor, now exactly the same number say Sarkozy’s policies are good. Post-electoral euphoria? Possibly, although BVA points out that “the economic policies of Sarkozy’s government are more popular than those of Villepin’s, Raffarin’s or Jospin’s governments ever were.” (That unconscious (??) lapse of mixing a president in the same breath as three prime ministers is interesting, and shows one major change Sarkozy has brought about already: prime minister François Fillon is not up there, but by the same token, has Sarkozy down-graded himself?). 56% of those asked say his economic policies are goodish, to only 22% who think they are baddish: it’s that wide gap which speaks volumes. 53% are more confident for the future of the economic situation, against 36% who are less confident. That is not a landslide in favour of him, but a total lack of coherent alternative, which is not the same thing. Those who favour him most are the over-50’s and the wealthier.
Where he comes unstuck is in his speed. BVA took four of his key policies and asked people whether they wanted these pushed through quickly (as Sarkozy wants and is doing) or whether instead they thought there should be more time for debate. Predictably a large majority (73%) think that tax-deductible interest on mortgages should go through parliament yesterday (me, me, me); slightly less (60%) think that the law on a minimum transport service during strikes should go through straight away too (fed-up with losing money because they can’t get to work during one of the many train strikes), but more ominously the law to make universities autonomous needs more debate, say 50%, against 41% who think it should go through quickly. For one of the commentators on this blog, the idea of giving more power to universities, enabling them to do research and become important entities in their own right was one of Sarkozy’s greatest strengths, and anyone who’s had first-hand experience of French higher education would probably agree, but apparently many French people are not so sure. But there is worse: only 30% of those asked want full throttle applied to Sarkozy’s flagship project of a mini-treaty on Europe: fully 65% want more debate.

That is serious. The European mini-treaty is Sarkozy’s Big Thing in foreign affairs. On the very day of his coronation he flew off to Germany to discuss it, then he went to Brussels on the same mission, last week he went to Spain whipping up more support in advance of the summit later this month. The proposed treaty’s particularity is that it does not need a referendum but can be passed through parliament. Since it looks as though Sarkozy will have a huge majority in parliament, this means it will go through on the nod. Wait a minute, say 65%. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are against it or Europe, it means let’s discuss it properly. But “discussing it properly” means different things to different people. “We have discussed it,” Sarkozy would say. “During the campaign I told you I was going to push a mini-treaty. You voted for me. That was the discussion.”

I am not sure that will wash. Europe is the sensitive issue in France (as it is in Britain, for different reasons). The French know that two years ago the press and politicians nearly succeeded in pulling the wool over their eyes with the European Constitution – thanks to vigilant people on the web, their eyes were opened and they voted against. This time they will be wary – and Sarkozy could come unstuck. The feel-good factor may fade with this summer’s tan.

Journalists and commentators in Britain and the US often write about the knee-jerk reaction of many French people against anything vaguely resembling globalisation, risk or the use of private capital to create enterprise. It’s a reaction caused in part by an erroneous view of Britain – only this Saturday I was told by another guest at someone’s house that “of course in Britain you don’t really own your house. You have this iniquitous system whereby you own it for four or five years then it reverts to the real owner.” Someone somewhere had told him about leasehold and he assumed that all British houses were bought and sold on a maximum of a ten year lease. “That’s why,” he said, “you change houses so often, and that’s why,” turning triumphantly to the listening table, “so many English come to France – because here they can buy something which lasts – a freehold.”

Such jaw-dropping misinformation is not, of course, limited to the French. None of us knows much about how people in other countries think and we all assume sweeping generalisations from a particular example, but as Jacques Marseille shows in this article, the French dislike of anglo-saxon capitalism and its way of generating income lies deep and is in fact taught in school.

The article is particularly topical since this deep-rooted distrust of investing in, say, property is something Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to change, by encouraging people to buy their own houses. It is a move that has met with much criticism.

Jacques Marseille is an economic historian (and advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy). Many of his books have upset the French because they turn upside down the way they have been taught to see things – but he does this by going back to the source, examining the minutiae of daily life in the past. For me his great strength is to see and write about things as they are (or were), not as we might like them to be (or have been). I have often used statistics from his excellent book “Les bons chiffres pour ne pas voter nul en 2007”. I apologise for translating and posting this article without the author’s permission, but it is of great interest to those interested in France – and which British or American publisher would pay for it? More important, I prefer a French writer to criticise his compatriots rather than be accused of bias myself.

“To understand our reticence towards the British “model” all we have to do is go back to where it starts and discover how much our school history books form or deform our children. The first industrial revolution….appears in the history curriculum of the “classe seconde” [15 or 16 year olds at lycée].
“Let’s have a look at the most recent and commonly used text books. In one of them the chapter headed “Beginnings of Industrialisation in Europe” opens with two contrasting illustrations [I shall try to upload these later in the day]. On the left-hand page, the first engraving, entitled “Cottage Industry”, shows the interior of a family house in which, under the homely eye of kittens playing with balls of wool, prettily dressed women work with spinning wheel and spindle. The caption is: “At the end of the 18th century, most manufacturing was craft-based, with members of the same family all working together at home”.

“On the page opposite, laid out in such a way as to provoke questions, another English engraving, dated 1834, also shows women working, but in a factory this time, working at their machines under the watchful eye of a supervisor. Caption: “For certain key industries, such as steel or, as here, the cotton industry, the rise of mechanisation resulted in work being concentrated in factories.” The key question, which the lycéen is invited to answer: “What are the nature and consequences of the changes provoked by industrialisation in European societies?” The answer will surprise nobody: the transformation of production from the craft-orientated and family-based, to one in which the worker is the slave of the machine.

“In another text book, which also opens with two engravings, we see on the left-hand page the Palace of Industry at the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1855 and, on the right-hand page, a German power-hammer in 1832. Caption for these two engravings: “The machine, symbol of progress….and the worker, slave to the machine.” As a textual illustration of this statement, the authors have chosen an extract from Jules Michelet [19th century French historian] “Scarcely have you pushed away the tireless, relentless shuttle than it comes shooting back to you….the individual must adapt, the flesh and blood human must submit to the ceaseless rhythm of this steel being.”

“The way the chapter of the first book continues is just as revealing as its opening. There is an extract from the Communist Manifesto, which talks about the “despotism (of the manufacturers): even more stingy, odious and exasperating since their aim, loudly proclaimed, is profit.” To illustrate the beginnings of urbanisation, there is only one text, the 1839 “Walks in London” by Flora Tristan [an early French socialist and feminist]: “The contrast [in urban lifestyles]……..is more shockingly obvious in London than anywhere else. We pass from the City, whose sole motive is profit, to the aristocracy, contemptuous of all, coming to London for two months of the year to flaunt unbridled luxury, relishing their superiority by watching the spectacle of the common people’s misery!” Question to the students: “In what ways can London be said to be the symbol of the large modern town?”

“Finally, after a double page of exercises on children working down coal mines and the dramatic consequences of over-work taken from Friedrich Engels, the chapter ends with a text taken from The Economist. This final text is the only example to mention benefits of a revolution which reduced factory working hours for adults from 74 a week to 60, and for children from 72 to 40; it is the only mention of a revolution in transport; the only mention of a society in which “the nation’s greater affluence….benefitted not just those favoured by birth but all classes of the community.” This particular text is accompanied by a caption written by the authors of the text book: “The self-satisfaction of the British elite!”

“Published in 2005, these books, the basic text for French lycées, speak volumes about the way we see England’s role in the quest for material progress and the enrichment of society. No lycée student, for example, will be given the opportunity to write about the GDP statistics, so carefully gathered by the famous economist Angus Maddison. [If they were able to study them], they would learn that the GDP per British inhabitant, rose (in 1990’s currency) from 1,250 dollars in 1700 to 1,700 dollars in 1820 – an increase of 450 dollars in 120 years. These figures would also teach him that in France, the effect of this modernisation was to increase GDP per inhabitant from 910 dollars in 1700 to 1,600 dollars in 1850.

“In fact the three real questions which should be asked are: Why were all the basic inventions which created modern industry made and perfected in England? Why was it in England that this explosion of inventive spirit happened, accentuating its difference from continental Europe? Finally why is it in England, and not in another country, that agriculture became the feed-bed, and spirit of enterprise the yeast of growth?
“But asking these questions means admitting that our modern world owes a lot to the capacity of the British to overcome challenges, whereas everyone thinks of them as dull and sleepy. In France at the beginning of the 1970’s it was bon ton to post-mortem Albion and mock the British spineless indolence. So now, how can we bear it that Britain has overtaken us and that, at the very moment we adopt the 35 hour week, they should become the world’s 4th economic power?”